One of the challanges with using Twitter for activism is one that’s all too familiar to anybody who’s spent time online: dealing with trolls and other disruptions.* Twitter hashtags are completely open, so anybody can post on them, which means we frequently see tweets like:

I should also state that some sissy liberal might find me MEAN spirited and rough but they usually like it .. #p2 #rebellft # …

Thanks for sharing, dude.

Of course an occasional tweet like this isn’t a big deal; they’re easy enough to ignore. The bigger problem is with posts that lead to heated debates that cause so much traffic everything else gets lost. Last night, for example, one person wound up accounting for over 75% of the traffic on #p2 (counting his tweets and others responses to him). When this happens, people start to tune out — and based on research from Susan Herring and others, women in particular are far less likely to participate.

It’s important to recognize that this isn’t generally due to bad intent.** Twitter’s a great place for debates, and at first reaction hashtags for progressives (like #p2 and #topprog) and conservatives (#tcot) are natural places to have them. However, that gets in the way of using these channels for communications and organizing. It’d be much better to have the debates going on elsewhere. For example, as described in @martinschechter’s A modest proposal on Common Mistakes last week:***

A fellow Twitterer – http://twitter.com/txvoodoo – and I have come up with a proposal to create a new hashtag: #bipart. To be used by #tcots, #topprogs, and completely unpolitical people of all kinds who want to discuss political issues not with true believers only, and not with the intention of offending others, but with idea of challenging people of all opinions to participate in the exchange of ideas and challenges to orthodoxies or party platforms.

Great idea! Getting something like this started is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: until there are enough people following it, it’s hard to get good debates going, and until there are good debates going people won’t follow it. That’ll change over time, though. So one way of dealing with disruption is to engage with people and suggest they continue their debate on #bipart rather than the other hashtags.

What about the people who decline? The best thing to do is to ignore them: please don’t feed the trolls. Trolls usually are searching for attention; if they don’t get it, they go away.

Sometimes, though, people can’t resist responding … and the discussion spirals out of control. That’s when some Twitter search magic helps. For example, suppose there’s somebody named TROLL who’s posting in the #p2 hashtag and causing enough of a disruption that the noise is crowding out other discussions. Here’s the magic syntax to use for a search in Tweetdeck or Twitter search to ignore all the posts from TROLL and all the replies to TROLL

#p2 -from:TROLL -@TROLL

Last night, even when the arguments were flooding the “unfiltered” #p2 channel, this search reduced the noise to virtually zero. How cool is that?

Especially when combined with the #bipart hashtag, it can make a big difference. In the future, I can imagine clients like Tweetdeck making this even easier, perhaps using some of the ideas from Usenet killfiles. So give it a try!

jon

PS: we’ll be discussing this along with other topics related to progressives on Twitter in Monday night’s #p2 Twitterchat. Please consider joining us!

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Comments

As backup, if this simple approach doesn’t work, we can always fall back on something more elaborate along the lines of the One Million Strong for Barack Facebook group’s Community defense against trolls. But I figured the main post was long enough already without bringing this up 🙂

An Ignore feature would be great … what I want is a little more, though: ignore, and ignore people replying to this person. For example, I wouldn’t want to ignore either of you; but, if you wound up in a heated discussion with somebody who I’m ignoring, I’d just as soon not see those posts. Things are moving fast in client-land, though, so hopefully Tweetdeck and other clients will wind up supporting that at some point as well!

And good feedback on the techiness, Carlo. Tracy and I will be talking about this as well as other topics at NIM in Reno in a couple of weeks, so it’s particularly useful. I’ll think about how to simplify things.

[…] could quickly mess up the signal, though. Jon points this out as a problem with hashtags because Twitter hashtags are completely open, so anybody can post on them. It was evident today, too, as Skittles tried to experiment with turning their web site home page […]

I have been using monitter of late and really loving it because three searches go on simultaneously. I do not know if the Twitter search controls work with monitter or not, but I probably would be more inclined to keep the trolls in view, just for the heck of it. Although on a personal note I block all trolls and other pervs, that cannot be done with a hashtag community.

What is the point of a hashtag community anyway, if not openness?

Although I am new to this community (Twitter), I am not new to politics or heated debates or technology, for that matter. I think debates are good. One person’s troll could be another person’s convert – it is possible.

Although we probably would all agree on what is not allowed, we may all disagree about what is allowed, considering there is a hazy, grey zone in all interpretations of reality.

As a professor of educational anthropology I have taught many courses on race and diversity. My students were often white elite females. I have learned that it is better to love everyone openly even if those people are closed minded.

Perhaps it would be okay to have someone like Joe, or whomever, step in as moderator such as in a forum? The moderator could suggest through DM, if possible, or if not DM, then replies without the hashtag, that the discussion take place elsewhere.

Or if the individual was abusive, everyone involved should block him or her and not use the hashtag or change the hashtag in extreme cases. Perhaps there should be a back up hashtag used that is more secretive for that evening or week or so.

I hope this short introduction to me and my style of being political has endeared me to you because I would really like to be a big part of this diversity attempt. I can give you my political background if you like under private cover — nothing is truly safe! LOL

But alas, the troll has now been fed; so we have to do something about it. When this behavior becomes normalized, it marginalizes women. [Ref: Susan Herring, Gender and power in online communications, and many others.]

As Tracy Viselli pointed out in email, the key is to engage without giving positive feedback. So I decided to give negative feedback. Since trolls love attention, why not encourage people how to ignore them — and give steps to make it easier.

My tweets:

RT @HumanFolly: How cute. @WNCGOP is deriving power from being a troll on Twitter. (grr. i hate trolls.) #topprog

A Troll On Twitter? @WNCGOP #gop #tcot #sgp #teaparty, are you embarrassed or proud? #trolls